Update: 07/14/2008
I can no longer recommend drupal value hosting. Perhaps they are experiencing growing pains, but their support, as of this writing, is virtually non-existent. I will update this if things turn around again

So my glowing reports about MediaTemple GridService seem to have been a bit premature. Perhaps i was blinded by the sheer sexiness of their website and control panel. Maybe it was the spin or hype around the "Grid" technology.

In any case, the speed of my sites on MediaTemple (or at least my perception of their speed) has decreased dramatically over the past couple of weeks. To their credit, MediaTemple was still much faster than 1and1 shared hosting, but much slower than my now current host.

Through the drupal forums i was offered the opportunity to try out "Drupal Value Hosting". They read my glowing report of MediaTemple and challenged me to run the same benchmarks on their service. They set me up an account and i copied my sites and database over to try it out.

Eh.. shared hosting, for 10 bucks a month... how great could it be? Well sheesh, just to validate how great MediaTemple GridService was vs. traditional shared hosting, i thought i'd give it a try. Well to my huge suprise, this cheapy shared webhost outperformed MediaTemple by a factor of 10. Yes, i said Ten. I haven't seen this kind of performance even from low-end dedicated servers or mid-grade VPS setups.

In any case, after a few weeks of testing, i got an account with them and went through the painful, time-sucking process of transferring all my sites across and getting them configured.

Drupal Value Hosting is great. They run Cpanel, allow reselling, shell access, customized php.ini settings and more. But... they offer only email / ticket style support, and their website is butt ugly and is a terrible experience to navigate.

As I'm pretty superficial, those blemishes were hard for me to see past. However, I'm extremely pleased with the sheer performance and speed of both database queries and PHP execution times on this web host. Highly recommended for anyone with technical expertise and the need for super-fast, affordable database driven websites.

If you're feeling brave, give 'em a try